Clyde Haberman

Shock, dismay and fear were dominant emotions then for Americans. How, they asked, could they have fallen so appallingly behind their Cold War enemy in this new field of combat, the space race? Their political leaders felt a sense of urgency. Nine months after Sputnik, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration came into being, followed soon by the human spaceflight program known as Project Mercury. Four years later, in 1962, the young president, John F. Kennedy, boldly pledged that before the decade was out, the United States would send men to the moon.

And it did. The tortoise persevered and surpassed the hare, its dominance affirmed on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts set foot on the lunar surface. It was a moment of American exultation and global fascination, viewed on television by more than half a billion people — one-seventh of the planet’s population.

But it proved to be just that: a moment. There were some doubts among Americans, even before Apollo 11 but certainly after, about the wisdom of reaching for the stars while troubles swelled on Earth. By that July in 1969, opposition to the Vietnam War in the U.S. was reaching a critical mass, riots scarred one city after another, and traditional values seemed under assault on multiple fronts.

For all its glory, the moon walk struck some people as an empty luxury. Popular interest in the space program faded fast; the astounding had become ho-hum. Three scheduled lunar flights were canceled. The last time a human walked on the moon was 1972, when “The Godfather” was the top-grossing movie and the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 1,000 for the first time.

“Apollo symbolized more than anything else in the 1960s what can be done with a very rational approach, putting faith in the experts, setting the goals, and having them achieve those goals,” said Matthew D. Tribbe, a history professor and author of “No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture.” “But a growing number of Americans, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, are seeking something more out of life than just material progress or technological progress like Apollo represents.”

But NASA grasped early on that if taxpayers were to accept pouring billions of their dollars into the project, a measure of slick salesmanship would be required.

Thus, NASA press kits became almost as important as computer chips. The astronauts and their wives were thrust before the public with all the verve of a Hollywood agent. Beating the Russians was touted as a national imperative. It hardly hurt the effort to have a prominent cheerleader in Walter Cronkite, routinely described back then as the most trusted man in America. Taken together, these elements amounted to one giant leap for public relations.

“I believe the marketing aspect of Apollo was as important as the spacecraft, I absolutely do,” David Meerman Scott, the author of several books on marketing, said. Communicating both the scientific significance and the glamour, he said, “was absolutely essential for us to have been able to do that program.”

Nonetheless, it was a fragile fascination, as reflected in some of that era’s movies. A year before Apollo 11, Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” showed astronauts struggling with a computer that had gone homicidally haywire. Later, in 1977, space-probe skeptics could enjoy “Capricorn One,” a film about a faked mission to Mars. “If we look at the broader cultural context,” Tribbe said, “we start to see an era when Americans are starting to grow a little bit suspicious of the kind of technology that Apollo represents.”

After the first few moon landings, the program became a harder sell. Lethal explosions aboard the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 produced national mourning but not renewed chin-up determination to conquer space. The government space agency began to be nudged aside by startup companies created by the likes of Elon Musk and Jeffrey P. Bezos looking to exploit whatever commercial potential the cosmos may hold. Perhaps not wanting to be fully eclipsed by business enterprises, NASA announced this month that it would let private citizens visit the International Space Station — for a hefty fee, to be sure.

And yet the spirit of sheer adventure, so widely felt in July of 1969, never disappeared. That, too, is shown in popular culture, be it in “The Right Stuff” book and movie, the novel and film “Contact” or the adventure movie “The Martian.” The Trump administration seems to have caught the mood. It has promised to send astronauts back to the moon as early as 2024, though many experts regard that target date as overly ambitious.

If the past is prologue, the public may need to be sold on the idea, just as it was half a century ago. “It’s always about storytelling,” Scott said. “The best marketers on the planet are able to tell stories. And that’s what’s important for space travel going forward.”

“You need to rekindle our imagination,” he said, adding, “We need to tell the story of why we should be investing in this. There’s still potential for that kind of story.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/us/marketing-moon.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

How NASA sold the science and glamour of space travel

(Retro Report): On an October Friday in 1957, Americans discovered that while they had been busy making weekend plans, their country had become the tortoise to the Soviet Union hare. Soviet scientists that day shot into orbit the first artificial Earth satellite, a beeping metallic ball not quite 2 feet in diameter that circled the globe every hour and a half at 18,000 mph. It was called Sputnik, “traveling companion” in Russian.

<h1>As fate would have it, word of Russell Baker’s death came the same day as a Manhattan screening of a new HBO documentary, “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists.” Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill were archetypes of a New York brand of columnizing that they all but invented more than half a century ago. They came at writing with chins out and fists clenched, crafting sentences taut and devastating.</h1>

Baker, 93 when he died, was a deadline artist, too. But he approached the world at a 45-degree angle, tending toward whimsy and japery in some 5,000 “Observer” columns that he wrote for The Times across 36 years. His approach was no less shattering than that of the New York brawlers. He punctured those who were pretentious, satirized that which was foolish, lamented what was distressing and pondered the endless inanities of daily life. He did it three times a week for much of his career, in 750-word offerings graced with the effortlessness of a Ted Williams swing.

Like Breslin and Hamill, Baker grew up poor, in his case in rural Virginia. An impoverished childhood may not be indispensable to becoming a great columnist, but it sure doesn’t seem to hurt. In their heyday, Hamill and Breslin were widely imitated by big-city newspaper writers everywhere. Baker not so much. Maybe that’s because copying a Swiftian sensibility doesn’t come easily. I know, because I tried in my own years as a city columnist. Russell Baker was my ideal. But I never amounted to more than Beatlemania to his Beatles. Face it, you can’t match an original.

His reflections on journalism remain as valid as ever — these days, more valid than ever. In a memoir, he despaired of the life of a young reporter, sitting outside a closed Senate meeting and “waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me.” Yet he also appreciated the importance of showing up and hanging in there. He told of an afternoon in Washington when he was walking to The Times’ offices with the paper’s bureau chief, James Reston. They heard a car crash not far away. Let’s take a look, “Scotty” Reston said. Why bother? Baker replied. Because, his boss said, you never know; a Cabinet secretary might be in the car.

And in an anything-goes era, he knew that life and writing must both have limitations. “The problem with having no taboos is that it encourages second-rate work,” he told The Hartford Courant in 1994, adding, “When you’re working up against taboos, when you’re playing very close to the edge, you tend to write better.”

Breslin, who died in 2017, is hard-pressed in the HBO documentary to think of a bad column that he’d ever written. Baker knew instinctively that life is never so kind.

Max Frankel, a former Times executive editor who earlier was in charge of the Sunday sections, tells of having persuaded him to write a column for the Sunday magazine in addition to his work for the daily paper. I want Baker’s best, the editor insisted. Well, the columnist said, if you want the best of me you’ll also have to also print the worst.

He understood the sad reality for any regular columnist: Some days you just don’t have it. Even with a Ted Williams swing, the best hitters, the absolute best, fail roughly two of every three times. Russell Baker’s batting average was a lot higher than that, for sure. A hell of a lot higher.

This article originally appeared in <a id="326e1bfa-3887-4336-b001-d6b7335cf408" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/russell-baker.html">The New York Times</a>.

Russell Baker: Wit and whimsy on deadline

Baker, 93 when he died, was a deadline artist, too. But he approached the world at a 45-degree angle, tending toward whimsy and japery in some 5,000 “Observer” columns that he wrote for The Times across 36 years.

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Pulse Kenya is the most followed news and entertainment platform in Kenya. It informs and engages young Kenyans around the clock and provides updates by the hour.

Clyde Haberman

Articles written by the author

How NASA sold the science and glamour of space travel

Russell Baker: Wit and whimsy on deadline